Massive has launched a video game advertising network, offering top global brands an opportunity to deliver advertising campaigns across a network of titles and genres to the hard-to-reach 18-to-34-year-old male audience.

Advertisers consider the young male audience to be increasingly difficult to reach through television and other existing advertising channels. The new network allows advertisers to simultaneously reach an aggregated audience of gamers through real-time delivery of advertising across an entire network of top-selling video games.

The company insisted that the ads flow seamlessly into the gaming environment with no impact on game play or performance, making in-game advertising painless and unobtrusive for gamers, publishers, and advertisers alike. The first advertiser to participate in the network will be RealNetworks, a creator of digital media services and software.

Game publisher relationships already in place will allow Massive to serve ads into more than 15 titles and reach a weekly audience of close to two million young men. Massive has already signed exclusive in-game advertising agreements with Vivendi Universal Games, UbiSoft and Legacy Interactive.

While audiences for traditional channels like network television and mass-market magazines continue to decline, especially among the coveted 18-to-34-year-old male demographic, the company said the popularity of video games is growing rapidly. The $10 billion that U.S. consumers spend each year on video game cartridges, software, consoles, and accessories, it said, is greater than the annual take at movie theater box offices.

The technology backbone behind the network is Massive’s proprietary ad serving technology, a client-server system that delivers advertising into video games within the network, and measures and reports results. Once integrated into a game, the client library pulls down advertising from the server in the background of game play and reports each time the play sees an ad.

Massive manages ad campaigns on the back-end to meet advertiser requirements such as airing ads only during prime time or on Sunday nights, or to specific segments within the network, as well as to ensure it meets reach and frequency goals. The entire process is invisible to the player and optimized so as to not impede game play or online performance.

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